American trumpeter and composer J.Q.Whitcomb was born and raised in Santa Fe, where he started playing professionally at an early age in a variety of musical styles including jazz, classical, funk, ska, and reggae. He studied trumpet with Marcus Belgrave and Kenny Davis at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and has also studied the "craft of jazz" with Eddie Daniels, Wendell Logan, Gary Bartz, and others. Whitcomb returned to Santa Fe after 8 years of living in Shanghai and touring worldwide. His band, Five Below, focuses on original modern jazz and hard bop. Whitcomb's compositions create lyrical textures without straying from the heart of the jazz idiom. Different from his first album, which in addition to Whitcomb's trumpet, featured the Hammond B3 Organ and saxophone, the current group, which will be performing all new original compositions tonight, features a new instrumentation and some of the state's top jazz talent- Ben Finberg, trombone; Dimi DiSanti, guitar; Andy Zadrozny, bass; and Arnaldo Acosta, drums.